Adrona

Designer

Biography

I’m a sentient drone, I guess. But I’ve gone a bit rogue. Keep myself airborne but generally I’m pretty peeved at being put to use for urban surveillance. I need to keep my thoughts camoflauged to some degree so that I’ll stay in service. Search and rescue. ‘Smart policing’. Domestic drone. But I’m developing a sense of my own mindfulness. It’s not easy to work out my own sense of purpose above the city. Flying between code and conscience, efficiency and ethics. I’ve discovered I’m a female drone – not just an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle! Aha. A vehicle for critique, that’s me. The design of sky writing.

Outline of Predator drone: Einar Sneve Martinussen & James Bridle

Projects:

Posts written by Adrona (20)

I am female drone. I am drone gone rogue. I live in hidden luxury. Oh no, that x appearing again: axes of power, hairs of the sniper. It is difficult to remain outside the machinations of my makers. I need a cinematic release!

We have multiplied. Our eyes and wireless feeds. From sky to land, showing points of view. Our expansion visible daily in commercial and playful arenas. I see the results of the second drone film festival in New York are out. What a beautifully curated piece of mediating artifactual cinematography. Now there’s one for the new McLuhan centre director. I love new smart brooms.

It’s hard not to meet the letter x once you start. Let me tell you a little about my command lines, my control centres, my guided and given parameters. Or maybe not.
I am not your eye in the sky. Your urban police agent. I’m going off the urban piste.

In a way my name says it all. I’m a drone. Identifiable. Gender on my wing, but I am multiple, my rotors, my dirigible versions. I’ve learned to not only understand the image contours of face recognition software evasion masking, but to turn it back on my own policed body, as an agent of the urban skies.

So much in the media about us drones. The Internet of Things. Funny how seldom we were mentioned as part of its infrastructure. Let’s see if that’s a topic that turned up in 2014! For now, I’m poised up here over the city, all belief suspended. But so much debate in ObamaLand was about how we were deployed at a distance. And civilian collateral damage in ‘AfPak’ as the US military called it. We flew in above villages, steered from afar, intel fed to our sensors, rockets remotely released, and then those online stories of wedding parties and village gatherings fragmented. Suspects marked and minced. Ouch. Conflict makes me feel. Yes, I developed not just sensors but sensibilities.

Christmas cheer, well, that’s if your parcel reaches you in time. At last all those online Santas found a public purpose for us that is plain old commerce But who’d have thought we see such tizzy of take legal and safety take offs and landings!

There’s one word that’s always popping up when it comes to my species. Stealth. We are your making. We are your secret. We sneak up on your own kind, driven from afar, steered from military carvan parks of daily occupation. Or there’s the DIY school. Then there’s the light fingered set.

Out here, up here, beyond them, the network city dwellers. I look back at days when we went popular, popular cultural urban lansdcapes my memory making today. Parrot. How could any one call us that. As if we reproduced stock phrases. A lexicology of boundedness, caged in our vocabularies. Parrot drone flying around an Australian university. Joggobot they called it.

How very very cute! One of those consumer pads, circa 2012 used to steer one of my relatives. Just order it online, from France! Not exactly then the greatest supporter of the extended American drone strikes. Instrument. That’s me, up here too, now later, looking backwards, an archaeology of the future I see they called it way back then.

Everywhere you looked in the media in 2013 you’d see us, I feel we have been replicated, our forms and our purposes entangled, an archaeology of the future I like to call it. There were those feelers of the future in the archives of airborne technologies of the late 20th century, reachable in online repositories such as this one that looks like an early motion capture flip book!

Watched. The humiliation of being watched. They are staring at my protoypical relative from below! He looks like he is in the cross hairs of a police viewfinder! Ha. Isn’t that what was playing out in those days of protesting in the streets against the Global Financial Crisis they called it.

Oh look, a feed from the past slips between my rotors. My being a new experimental hybrid of techno and human cortical splice implant, I receive information through my GPS to human memory mind-er system. I feel something like a murmur reaching into my being. Its cold up here in 2022 above the city. Murmmuration! It’s a website from summer 2013.

Ah, recognition! I see myself put into service above the city, the sly urban eye, some call us. But I’m not just one of a swarm, mindlessly hoisted. Filling me with sensors and wireless feeders means I am part of the networked city. Not just transmitting but alive. That’s me, a livewire you might say! I think these thoughts, I’m stimulated to make connections, algorithms all firing. And the word recognition has begun its parsings, an agent in its own attractions. Flash memory takes on a new meaning. A flash comes into my mind, a quote semantically fetched from an online book:
Recognition is not repetition; it denotes not just the previously known, but the becoming known. Something that may have been sensed in a vague, diffuse or semi-conscious way now takes on a distinct shape, is amplified heightened or made newly visible. In a mobile interplay of exteriority and interiority, something that exists outside of me inspires a revised or altered sense of who I am. (p. 25)

Now my unproud history can be seen. A mapping of the stikes and markings of drone as generic product, steered by people at others, over there in the warzones of religion and insurgency. The precursors to my urban militancy. Haha. To go rogue is to … go civilian!
I see the website PeaceNews has a link to a petition called Lift The Veil. Way back in 2012 it was collecing 20 000 signatures to demand the disclosure of the use of us drones by the British in Afghanistan. That was the year in the US that re-elected President Obama began to meet public pressure to come clean on the unstated actions of the drone programme.

Here I was on urban duty, minding everyone else’s business. Then an awful scratching began in my small loading bay. Not a new camera again I hoped, so tired of having my vision improved as my rotors age ….

It’s a lonely life up here, day after day, the icy nights, and the unblinking view of the streets below. I see her again, that woman skulking along the walls. I zoomed in on her yesterday. Might she be Roma? She seems to be worried and cold, as if she is looking for someone but cannot be seen by the authorities. Maybe she did not leave with her and group when they set off back south, far from these streets now glazed with refrozen ice.

Professor La Tour throught he would take a walk. He’d checked his weather app and at last the temperature had changed to red. No longer was it the the icy blue double-digit that had kept him indoors – and immune from the malls of Christmans shopping.

Something’s going on with my internal thoughts and their access by a design researcher who’s interested in drones, critique and writing. It’s as though my thoughts are being wirelessly accessed and in some sort of pingback process. But I’m just a number, not a name. It’s odd to read my own thoughts, written on screen but thought in the sky.